Welcome to the Assis group website! We are located in the beautiful beachside city of Boca Raton, FL.

Beach Birds in Boca Raton, Florida

Our group develops computational and statistical approaches to address questions about evolution and disease from their genomic footprints. A major focus of our work is on structural variations (SVs), which arise from duplications, deletions, inversions, and translocations of large genomic segments. Recent studies show that SVs are more prevalent and often impact phenotype to greater degrees than small-scale variations, suggesting that they serve as a major reservoir of adaptive and disease-related genetic diversity. We are currently designing novel machine learning methods for understanding the evolutionary and disease implications of different types of SVs by determining how they modify gene expression, assessing their adaptive significance, and probing their roles in normal and disease phenotypes. We are also developing machine learning methods for making predictions about associations between genes and traits, as well as other important problems in evolutionary biology, including resistance to commonly-used antibiotics and evolutionary trajectories of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. These projects are supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Interested in our research? Join us!